I think it about time to write on my blog about a useful label I coined to categorize whom in humanity I think is the “enemy”. Before you can stand up to your enemy, you need a way of identifying them.

This all started for me back in 2006 on reading, “Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill” by Jessica Sterns. A great book, I recommend reading it.

In that book the author goes about describing bad people doing bad things, categorizing them in various ways with various labels. It somehow seems a little too complicated, with too many labels. I spent considerable time with Occam’s Razor deployed trying to minimalise the book. I got it down to four (4) words.

I will note here that until very recently, I was happy with my original 4-word definition: Belligerent Radicalized Evangelical Fundamentalist

A few people I’ve discussed my ideas with, Christians to a person, did not like the “Evangelical” part. To me, a cultural Christian (a Christian unconvinced of the God bit), I did not see a problem, but they did.

So, fair enough, “Proselytizing” replaces “Evangelical“, and while BREF slips much more easily from the tongue, BRPF it is.

The label is easy to utilize, you just need to analyse your subject and see if the label applies.

It’s best to work backwards:

Does the person have Fundamental views, ie, views written-in-stone; do they follow a dogma that cannot be changed or they choose not to change?
If so, they’re a “Fundamentalist“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalism

Does the person go out and about into the world, physically or digitally, to spread their chosen Fundamental dogma with the aim to convert you into believing it?
If so, they’re “Proselytizing“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proselytism

Would the Civil Society of Humanity view their dogma as containing radical/extreme notions. Is their dogma outside middle-of-the-road, [far] Left or [far] Right – not centrist? Have they been moved further out from centrist views by their dogma.
If so, they’ve been “Radicalised“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radicalism_(historical)

Does this person choose to use or condones the use of physical force to convert others to believe their dogma or to adhere to their dogma.
If so, they are a “Belligerent“: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belligerent

Now let me say right now that ALL those words need to be answered Yes for the “BRPF” label to be accurate. For example, I know some Fundamentalists who’s fundamental dogma is to be nice to people, some of them are RPF’s, but without the “B”, I don’t think they’re humanities “enemy”.

As for examples of BRPF’s, I leave that for you to decide, and you an only decide that if you have a good old think about the above for a while (and clicking the links to Wikipedia to get some more grounding in the actual words’ meanings).

You readers are my peers, and I would like you to rip the definition apart if you think you can <throws down the virtual gauntlet>, so comments are most welcome.